There is endless amounts of lithium deposit everywhere. A lithium deposit is essentially worthless.
What matters in lithium industry, is chemical processing. Nobody cares about a lithium mining company. What matters is lithium processing.
Lithium is not like a base metal, its more like a specialty chemical. The output from every mine is unique, there is not overall standard. Each output from each mine has to be qualified with each major battery manufacturer.
Nevada has 100s of billion of dollars worth of lithium by itself probably.
This will almost certainty not be mined. Making money from this kind of rock is difficult in the first place and doing it in a place with little mining industry makes that even worse.
Edit:
If you want insight into lithium industry, I recommend 'Global Lithium Podcast' by a guy that has been in that business for many decades and has worked for all the many of the major producers.
But, seemingly, this one is "The richest known hard rock lithium deposit" so it's got to be worth something, at least it's newsworthy I guess.
Anyway, the article is not about the operation of mining lithium, how to earn money on lithium or even chemical processing, it's about regulation about mining in Maine, the deposit itself just being the driver of the story. It also goes into describing the supply chain around lithium and some other goodies.
It doesn't cost much to get a few inches of buzzword copy that makes people ask "why won't they just lift the regulations so we can have the free money?" without really writing anything that leaves readers better and truthfully informed about a topic.
We've got good responses by disinterested parties who know a lot about lithium and mining here, and it's the single sided argument funded by unknown sources that is generating the sticky "but what if"s.
I did find it interesting that the primary source for this article appears to be the couple who owns the land the deposit is on. They would obviously have an interest in making this deposit seem special, especially since it seems like they want to pressure the state to allow them to mine it.
Seems to have to do with that it's "hard rock" instead of something else, and the purity? Not sure, not a chemist/geologist, but here is what they say in the article about it:
> The Freemans and researchers at Plumbago North knew the crystals they found were extraordinary as soon as they uncovered them. To determine the concentration of lithium, they sent bulk samples for analysis at labs in Australia and Germany.
> The results, said Simmons, were astonishing. The deposit showed an average lithium oxide content of 4.68% by weight. That’s three times the average concentration of the world’s top 10 hard rock lithium mines. By comparison, the world’s second-richest hard rock lithium deposit, the Bernic Lake mine in Manitoba, has a lithium oxide content of 2.76% by weight and contains roughly eight million tons of ore.
"Rich" means high concentration of lithium in ore. This deposit does seem to be top 1 in that measure, 4.68%.
For comparison, Greenbushes, THE lithium mine in West Australia, is 1.60%. Note that Greenbushes is actually famous for its high concentration. More typical is Mt Cattlin at 0.50%. This deposit is 3x richer than Greenbushes and 9x richer than Mt Cattlin, which is in fact astonishing as the article says.
Tesla’s suppliers are Ganfeng Lithium, China, mined in China and Australia. Kidman Resources, Australia, same, processed in China. Pure Energy Minerals, Canada, uses Chinese processing as of 2018.
Your Tesla’s lithium was likely mined in Australia, tanker shipped to China, it leaves China as lithium hydroxide and may be final assembled into batteries in USA or Canada. Like almost all materials for “green” products, lithium, composites, aluminum, microchips, the western world has boxed themselves out of making these things. So China does it where they set their own carbon standards, and can manipulate value, pay, trade, subsidies.
There is a ton more to the conversation when someone says “we just need stricter cap and trade” because China knows the grip over everyone else they have. I rarely see people who know how things are made make that argument with any practical effectiveness, unless it ends with “we go to war”.
EDIT: So, to the topic, does it make sense to mine in Maine and ship to China for processing? Is this new reserve that good?
In fact most of the hydroxide goes threw Korea or Japan (sometimes even both I think). There the hydroxide is made into cathode materials. This cathode materials are then shipped to Nevada, where Panasonic creates cells, hands them to Tesla to put into packs. Packs get put into cars.
Tesla always had the vision of doing cathode processing in house, but I think in Nevada they never went that far (unless this has changed).
In Austin Tesla is planning a plant to transform Spodumene ore into hydroxide. This ore would come from North Carolina. However this mine project seem to be delayed so for quite a while they will likely continue to buy hydroxide (they have to buy anyway but buy less at least).
They are also planning, and are already building a cathode materials plant. There they would bring together nickel, lithium hydroxide and co to make a cathode materials.
They are also already building a cell plant where they would use that material to make cathode and cells.
They are also attempting to mine their own lithium in Nevada, but that will take a quite a few years to come online (if ever).
There are quite a few companies trying to get into all of these markets in the US, but compared to China its still a small amount and they are way behind
Seems I might’ve been office step doesn’t leave China as hydroxide then.
It’s actually really crazy but your green vehicle battery has to go from Australia to China to Japan to Nevada just to got one more place for final assembly.
Agreed on the if-ever. There is a lot my company is forced to do outside of the US and given the costs, we would never break even with buying from China, literally never.
Just to be clear, it leaves as hydroxide to Japan or Korea mostly.
> It’s actually really crazy but your green vehicle battery has to go from Australia to China to Japan to Nevada just to got one more place for final assembly.
And then might get delivered back to Australia or Britain or whatever.
This is also why one of Musk major focus on Battery Day was 'how far does a battery atom have to travel' is a major measure of success for them.
That area of Maine has absolutely no infrastructure to be able to do anything with such a deposit, and there's no way that the sclerotic government and regulatory agencies would allow you to build such infrastructure to process it, or even transport it elsewhere to where it could be processed.
I don't like your description of sclerotic, implying the government is dysfunctional if it doesn't allow heavy industry open strip mining near "a few miles northeast of the ski slopes of Sunday River and not far from Step Falls, where swimmers can wade in shallow pools formed by hundreds of feet of cascading granite ledge." 50 years from now when the area is a wasteland with polluted rivers I'm sure the residents who remember going swimming in natural ponds will be grateful for the nimbleness of their government
While true. Those are clay deposits. Nobody has yet managed to make commercial clay deposits an actual thing. So Nevada has these theoretical deposits that are large but nobody has managed to mine any. The same goes fro Clay deposits everywhere.
Here we are talking about Spodumene rocket deposit. These are typically somewhat higher grade but they have a proven track record and company with knowledge on how to commercially make lithium hydroxide or carbonade from it.
Spodumene was basically the original source for lithium, that we used to make nuclear weapon and later glass. This was for a long time almost driven out of the market by brine projects (mostly in South America) but the demand for high grade lithium hydroxide has lead to a Spodumene boom in West Australia.
Had the same reaction, essentially since the article goes on in length about how the Brooksville mine turned into an environmental disaster that cost taxpayers tens of millions to clean up. It's not like there's no history here.
It's basically on US2. That's not very rural as far as mines, logging and other resource extraction goes. You don't really need "infrastructure" to build a resource processing facility since everything is global these days anyway. You need a road that can handle truck traffic. The days of a paper mill having parts made by the toolmaker across town are long gone. Your specialty stuff will all show up in trucks that say Fedex or XPO on the side and the special people who help you get it running will all show up in cars with the little Enterprise sticker on them.
No one is going to ship lithium ores overseas or down highways to a processing plant, regardless of what the property owner imagines. That burns a lot of diesel and costs a lot of money to move a product that’s over 90% unwanted dirt. The economics aren’t there. Purification on site is much more efficient. If they can’t purify it in Maine they’ll mine it somewhere else.
Route 2 out through Bethel there isn't much of a road. It's a winding two-lane stretch of blacktop that isn't as well maintained as it used to be now that all the mills in Berlin are gone.
I've driven almost all of US2 in Maine at some point or another. A 2-lane road is sufficient for pretty much every industrial venture. If a 2-lane road isn't sufficient then the facility's driveway won't be sufficient either. There isn't that much traffic. There will be dozens of people working there and trucks coming and going.
You don't need an upscale suburb to run this kind of facility. Employees won't be put off because the commute isn't 15min or because they can't go to a boutique sandwich shop during lunch break.
If a 2-lane road isn't sufficient then the facility's driveway won't be sufficient either.
I'm guessing that their driveway won't be open to public traffic and would be built to withstand constant use by massively heavier trucks than are commonly seen on US2, so I don't think this is an apples-apples comparison.
It's not just about weight, it's about density. Spodumene is about twice the weight if fresh cut wood on a ft^3 basis. A truck load of 80k Spodumene is going to be putting it's weight down over a much smaller foot print, and wear & tear on a road doesn't necessarily scale linearly so it's going to wear the roads significantly faster than wood. In my area there are highways where cargo trailers can't drive. The highways they're allowed on require more frequent maintenance.
The issue isn't a show-stopper, but you can't just say "it's a two lane highway, that's enough" and "we already have heavy loads on the road, it will be fine". The are more variables to account for when determining the infrastructure necessary for large industrial operations.
Kentucky is full of mountain roads with questionable maintenance and build quality which are used by coal and mining trucks all the time. They are basically one lane roads too.
As long as the "road" is kind of flat and made of something slightly more sturdy than sand, these trucks can get through.
I don't think the Kentucky coal mining scene is the ideal comparison here or what we should hold up as the aspirational standard for new initiatives. Especially when you say the roads are poorly maintained, and especially when the Maine road in question isn't just some mountain road, it's the main highway through a significant portion of Maine, and a secondary highway (parallel to I 95) through other parts. What you describe on Kentucky sounds minimally adequate for its own needs and not at all comparable to this situation.
What do you think the odds of someone driving all of US2 in Maine without living there for many years are? It's not like it provides a very direct route between high traffic or popular portions of the state.
We have a deposit here in Portugal too. Didn't know Lithium production had all those complications. But wouldn't mine it and move it away to processing be an alternative? I don't know, the US has a lot territory and probably lithium, wouldn't mine it and move it be profitable?
Yes. This is what happens in Western Australia. Hard rock mining and selling is possible. Even then however the processor has to basically make the process specifically for the deposit.
So its not as easy as just selling it to the lithium ore market. You need a project partner that develops the project with you.
The only group currently processing spodumene to lithium are in China. Others want to make such project but I don't think they are online.
I'm not saying this deposit is worthless, I'm just saying 'this much lithium is there' is really not a good way to evaluate the actual value of a deposit like this.
Generally the location of mines like this is quite relevant, and a place that have bad regulation to begin with are very unattractive.
The traditional lithium belt in the US is in North Carolina, lithium was mined there for decades. Starting a new mine there, is already incredibly difficult. Doing it in a place with no such history will be far more difficult.
Lithium mining isn't like gold/iron/other metal mining. It's more like salt harvesting. So trucking away loads of dirt/salt/rock/ore to a processing plant isn't viable. You have to process it on site which means huge ponds for evaporation.
Tianqi built a converter in Kwinana for hydroxide (I was part of the build). But yeah you are correct for all the other small mines all sell to converters in China often through offtake agreements.
As I understand, Kwinana plant is done but closed for now. I found a Reuters article dated 2020-03-23, China's Tianqi postpones commissioning of Australia lithium plant amid liquidity problems.
Do processing facilities like this exist closer to Maine than China? If not, a new one would need to be built, so I think the GP is still generally correct about the local impacts.
The issue is that the further away from the mine you do your refining, the higher your transport costs are. All else being equal you’d rather transport a refined product a long way, rather than a product that’s 90% useless other rock.
> The manufacturing processes of lithium, including the solvent and mining waste, presents significant environmental and health hazards.[134][135][136] Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution.[137] It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage.[134] It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium).[134] Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.[138]
> In the United States, there is active competition between environmentally catastrophic open-pit mining, mountaintop removal mining and less damaging brine extraction mining in an effort to drastically expand domestic lithium mining capacity.[139] Environmental concerns include wildlife habitat degradation, potable water pollution including arsenic and antimony contamination, unsustainable water table reduction, and massive mining waste, including radioactive uranium byproduct and sulfuric acid discharge.
> Lithium metal is corrosive and requires special handling to avoid skin contact. Breathing lithium dust or lithium compounds (which are often alkaline) initially irritate the nose and throat, while higher exposure can cause a buildup of fluid in the lungs, leading to pulmonary edema. The metal itself is a handling hazard because contact with moisture produces the caustic lithium hydroxide. Lithium is safely stored in non-reactive compounds such as naphtha.
I'm not a chemist so I can't tell you what is so hard about it.
I can only say that there are not very many companies that can do it and even those companies seem to struggle a fair bit bringing new supply to market. Many startup have for long time tried all kinds of ways of bringing new supply to market, and many have seen huge delay.
Lithium was (and still is) a tiny industry and these process are pretty immature. Most lithium never needed to be as high grade as is required now.
Every company seems to have a lot of its own secret sauce. The people that are really knowledge about the subject are very thinly distributed and given the growth of the industry I would assume there are very few veterans.
You can't just go out get a bunch of veterans that have done it many times before, buy some standard equipment and get going.
Somebody in the comments here was involved in setting up such a project, so that person have some more insight.
Not an expert, or even an enthusiast tbh, but if I were to guess, I would say its because Lithium is way too reactive. It is basically impossible to find elemental Li and the compounds Li forms are difficult to break (I think). So unless the deposit is of some particularly easily collected and concentrated (removing the dirt and stuff, idk the technical term) or very easily broken, it probably won't be worth it to even try to get raw Li from the ore.
We have lithium and Jadarite[0] reserves in Serbia. Is potentially just trading the ore and/or moving the processing out of Serbia viable? However, with Rio Tinto investing, we're not looking solid environmentally.
1. Canada has a huge mining Industry and that’s right next door to Maine.
2. It’s possible to bring in multinational consultant teams specialized in mining industries. A location doesn’t have a mining industry until suddenly a big deposit is discovered and they do.
The price of Lithium seems to be extremely volatile. Currently it seems to be quite valuable. Probably highly dependent on how electric cars and general batteries are faring.
I think that logically, it doesn't make sense for Maine to change its laws to allow this to move forward. It's worth $1.5B and there are about 1.5M people in Maine. That's $1,000 per resident. Given that there are costs to extract the metal from the ground, let's say that 20% of that $1.5B could be profit (which I'm guessing is a very high estimate). That means $200 per Maine resident. Given that Maine doesn't own the land/mineral rights, let's say they can put a 30% tax on those profits. $60 per resident.
Realistically, $1.5B worth of lithium is a tiny amount of value for a US state. If I were Maine, I'd say no at $1.5B. You're probably going to get less than $60 per Maine resident - and that's a one-off $60, not even an annual $60.
The article keeps talking about how we need lithium. Ultimately, we don't seem to need it that much given how cheap it is. If I were Maine, I'd say "not now". If Lithium prices go up 100-1,000x in the future, then reevaluate. $6,000-$60,000 per Maine resident might be a useful amount of money. $60 isn't.
At current prices, any environmental damage is likely to cost more than the taxes on the profits would cover. $90M in taxes (30% of a 20% profit margin) won't clean up a lot.
I'm not saying that it's a global optimum for Maine to leave this lithium in the earth. I'm just noting that there isn't a lot of incentive for Maine to extract it. The article talks about other countries with less strict labor and environmental rules. That is true, but why should Maine risk its environment for such little money?
Why should Maine risk environmental damage for $60 per person? $90M in tax revenue is nothing compared to the cost to clean up environmental disasters. It's costing over $6M to clean up a single park in my town, never mind the type of environmental damage that might be caused by mining 11M tons of lithium. It seems like it would be foolish for Maine to alter the laws to allow the mining to take place at current prices.
Excellent analysis. People forget the economics of things from the state / people's perspective.
Also, a certain number of people, very small but not zero, will get sick and die. All of those nasty diseases that come from any mine operation, especially something nasty like lithium.
Those sick people will go on Maine's disability / unemployment insurance / LTC / Medicaid / Medicare's system. Some of those people will live decades with cancer, their medical care paid for by the state (as it should).
At current prices, like you said, it might literally cost Maine more to open the mine than to leave the lithium in the ground, especially once you factor in environmental cleanup and healthcare costs.
Another viewpoint to consider this is how long will it take to exploit this? 20 years, that is 75M in revenue per year, 30 years 50M and 50 years would be 30M. Not actually that high revenue numbers. 20% as profit from those, which sound optimistic would be 15, 10 or 6 million a year. Now tax those and on scale of state it isn't very big once again...
>The estimated $1 billion impact is on top of the income that lobstermen earn when they bring their catch to shore and sell it, which in 2017 was $433 million statewide.
According to this study Maine nets 1.5B per year from lobsters alone.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but it's important to remember that most states think of the 80% of that $1.5B that isn't profit as going to their citizens in the form of local spending.
This happens to be in the same vicinity as the most popular ski resort in the state, and a number of other popular outdoor attractions.
It's not quite your average rural economy that's desperate for any sort of new business/jobs/investment.
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A mine has to be weighed against the risk it represents to their existing economy - both in actual impacts of environmental disasters, and reputational if there's any negative stories coming out about it.
Tourists don't want to go have their destination wedding in the town that's in the news regularly because of X or Y pollution, even if they can't see it and it's not a risk to them on their visit.
Is it me being jaded or is a billion or two dollars not really that much money anymore? I mean sure, if someone were to give me a billion dollars I'd be excited (pending dealing with taxes etc). But I mean..theres what a couple thousand people with personal fortunes that could buy the entire deposit several times over, and even more companies that could do it...maybe it'd be a great windfall to the local economy? But if Maine is anything like North Carolina then the majority of the money will get earmarked for future infrastructure projects and then get slowly siphoned off by the politicians over a few years so it won't really matter.
We're exposed to billionaires and things priced in the billions all the time through news and media, but we forget that it's still an exceptional amount of money for a very, very limited few. Like how Instagram shows you all the exceptionally lucky people on holidays and with expensive cars and incredible beauty, so you get to feel like it's ubiquitous and you're just missing out. But the truth is that almost everyone just goes to work everyday, looking normal, driving normal cars, even the influencers.
A billion dollars worth of minerals is not a lot of minerals. It would be worth extracting if it were something readily shipped and processed like gold or crude. But from what I understand of lithium processing, just the equipment along might ring up in the hundreds of millions, and you still have to pay to get it extracted, processed, etc.
Billion dollar is lot even for a value of a company.
On other hand with deposits it's nothing. Reasonably considering the needed investment for exploitation from equipment, planning, permissions, workers etc. I really feel that currently it is nowhere near enough to justify exploitation. Big mines are not cheap to build or operate. I doubt 1,5B of material is enough to justify initial investment.
You're not jaded, the scale seems small in comparison to things like the Ring of Fire in northern Ontario or even just Sudbury on its own, where the value of mineral deposits are pitched in the 100s of billions.
It's not really surprising. The use of lithium batteries to replace fossil fuels is really just shifting where and what environmental impact is produced. It's not as clean as they claim to be. It's like coal plants with scrubbers saying they are clean. They are only relatively clean, just like lithium is only relatively clean.
At least the lithium deposit near the Salton Sea is already in an area that's an ecological disaster. It makes sense that Maine would want to protect their natural resources.
The issue is that while mines produce relatively localized environmental damage, climate change will produce globalized damage by ecosystem collapse and sea level rise. The sum total of this damage will be far greater than the marginal increase in mining required for battery production. Shifting, for sure, but the scale of destruction is the real question.
I'm not even convinced that there will be a "marginal increase in mining required for battery production," nor that there will be an associated increase in localized environmental damage.
Lithium mines produce localized environmental damage, _but so does fossil fuel extraction_. Think about environmental damage from mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking, offshore oil spills, etc.
With fossil fuels, you get localized environmental damage, _plus_ climate change.
With lithium, you get localized environmental damage, but you hopefully support a transition to renewables.
No, not at all. In the past year, they attempted to shut down one of last remaining paper mills that is keeping the beleaguered forestry industry alive by ordering the removal of a dam that alteady had had a fish ladder installed at great cost, because it might possibly still impact the spawning of a miniscule subpopulation of salmon.
There's been enormous conflict about simply building a high voltage transmission line across the boondocks of the western mountains to bring cheap green power down from the Quebec Hydro dams.
Scale is a good question. However, it might not matter if the residents (through the state) decide they don't want their local area to be destroyed. For example, climate change may not be as locally damaging as some massive strip mines.
Yes. The narrative that electrification just shifts around the pollution is so tired and untrue. The end to end pipeline of EVs is much more efficient than that of gas cars, so even if we start synthesizing fuels that are carbon neutral gas cars will lose. The only reason gas cars could ever exist is because of cheap and dirty fuel. The only car that makes sense in a sustainable system is an EV maybe with synthesized and carbon neutral hydrocarbon range extension for emergencies.
I don’t think the point of contention is whether it’s recyclable. Primary issue is: what is the local environmental impact of MINING lithium?
For folks who don’t live in Maine it’s a no-brainer: sure, go for it! Bring the USA more domestically produced lithium.
But… mining fucks up entire ecosystems and pollutes water etc… and even if companies can “promise” the operation will be clean, come to implementation they likely walk back on that and the damage is done.
For what's it worth, I live in a area that has done extensive mining for over 1000 years with no big natural disaster caused by it. Today it is only operational by small scale in comparison, (and it never experienced the big chemical industious mining), but you absolutely can mine the earth without creating havoc.
It is just a lot more expensive then.
Which is why most mining is done in remote, or poor areas, with laughable regulations, where no one dares complain for the jobs.
For what it’s worth, people mined rocks to build the pyramids multiple thousands of years ago. They don’t mine using an army of slaves wielding chisels anymore.
Genuinely curious, what are the alternatives to the three?
1. Mine lithium
2. Drill oil
3. Do nothing
You have to store energy somehow, even if the entire world shifted to walking everywhere. Goods still need to traverse the world and thus far there hasn't been anything else with a high enough energy density to get close.
The argument being made is that if mining lithium becomes more popular, its likely to lead to advancements that do limit its ecological impact and provide a more sustainable method for storing energy...
If America is benefiting from the Lithium we should also be mining it at home. Let's not shift our negative cost externalities to a different nation but instead own them.
I've read numerous analyses arguing that a small to mid size EV releases less CO2 and other pollution than a similarly sized typical gas car (or even a hybrid) even if the electricity comes from 100% coal.
Coal releases the most CO2 per unit energy. It's almost pure carbon after all. But to compare with a gasoline car you have to consider:
(1) Large power plants are anywhere from 1.5X to 3X more thermally efficient than a small piston engine. How much better depends on whether the power plant is an old school boiler and turbine or a newer supercritical steam or combined cycle plant.
(2) Gasoline is the highly refined and quality controlled end product of a long supply chain. Oil must be drilled, sometimes cracked (for heavy oil), shipped (often more than once), refined (this uses a lot of power), doped with small amounts of manufactured additives, then shipped at least one and sometimes two or three more times to a gas station. Every step of that supply chain uses even more energy, and this must be subtracted to get the overall end-to-end efficiency of a car engine. This makes car engine efficiency from oil well to tailpipe really suck. Coal meanwhile is often shipped only once or twice and requires minimal processing, usually just pulverization and then flue gas scrubbers at the exhaust end.
(3) ICE cars require a lot more maintenance and fluids that have to be changed, etc., and all that has to also be considered in their energy footprint.
EVs are superior in every single way except range and recharge time: complexity of the vehicle, reliability, acceleration and driving experience, urban pollution, overall emissions, and end to end efficiency. They remain superior even in the worst case of a 100% coal fired power grid, and very few regions get their power from only coal. The range and recharge time gap is already small enough to make EVs practical for 90%+ of driving scenarios and the gap is closing. The oil age is over.
The big question in my mind, is what are we going to build roads out of? Most of them are still using petroleum products. Concrete is a CO2 emitter too. What's left? Is there a point to creating electric cars if we find out that we need to do away with the infrastructure they require, or did we not think that far ahead yet? I'm genuinely curious what options exist to deal with this.
The problem is not petroleum products themself, the problem is burning the petroleum products. Even if we move the whole energy economy away from fossil fuels we'll still be using oil for lubrication, plastics, asphalt, and a bunch of other things. That is fine.
Eventually it is a problem - they are not renewable. Are all the components usable for these other uses? I thought some distillates only worked for some uses (can the gas portion be used for asphalt?).
I would also imagine there is immense heating from the road surfaces. Not to mention the fumes, chemicals used in the processing, and all the transportation.
If we're not burning petroleum for heating/electricity anymore I imagine our reserves will be enough for thousands of years of roads, chemicals, synthetic materials, etc. By then we'll have developed alternatives, if not sooner
I think that's wishful thinking on the timeline and a very hopeful outlook for technology to save us. It also doesnt answer the question of if some of the byproducts are only useful for burning. If I remember right, gasoline was originally considered a byproduct.
> EVs are superior in every single way except range and recharge time
While I'm also in favor of EVs, I can see two other ways in which EVs are not superior: weight (every article about EVs I read seems to mention that they're heavier than the corresponding ICE vehicles; on the other hand, the weight distribution seems to be yet another way in which most EVs are superior, with their low center of gravity), and price. The price seems to be the main barrier to EV adoption IMO, and is probably the reason they are so rare where I live (it's a major metropolitan area, and yet so far I have seen a non-rail EV only once).
> The price seems to be the main barrier to EV adoption IMO, and is probably the reason they are so rare where I live (it's a major metropolitan area, and yet so far I have seen a non-rail EV only once).
If you live on an area with electrified rail transit (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
Today, the price of EVs has dropped to within comfortable reach of middle to upper middle class people, who are most of the people who buy new cars anyways (the lower middle and working class are much more likely to buy used).
The bigger issue is cultural - with some areas (US coastal states and cosmopolitan cities, cosmopolitan parts of Europe, etc) being far further along in the cultural adoption of EVs.
This is changing though. On a recent trip to Michigan I saw a significant rise in EVs (I'm more well off areas) vs the not distant past and I suspect this is because Detroit automakers finally have solid EV offerings.
EVs, like smartphones, are now aspirational goods.
> If you live on an area with electrified rail transit (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
Railway lines in poorer or second-world (ex-USSR) countries were sometimes electrified since it ensured the most flexible and reliable fuel supply: you could run trains not only from oil, but also coal, gas, nuclear or hydroelectric power. Compared to diesel, the locomotives are cheaper, faster, quieter, and more powerful, and the operating costs for trains and track are lower. The ride quality is better, and it still felt "modern" to make the upgrade in the mid-20th century.
Sort by percentage electrified length on [1] and you have Ethiopia, Armenia, Montenegro, Georgia, Bulgaria, India, Poland, Azerbaijan, North Korea, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Morocco, Ukraine, South Africa, North Macedonia etc all with a significant proportion of their rail networks electrified.
> If you live on an area with electrified rail transit (which is where we ought to be going) but effectively no EVs that's surprising. Where is this?
Rio de Janeiro. Off the top of my head, we have Supervia (commuter rail, overhead catenary), Metrô Rio (subway, third rail), Corcovado train (touristic train, AC overhead catenary), Santa Teresa tram (tram, overhead catenary), and VLT Rio (tram, APS third rail). I know there are some EVs (I've seen it in the news a couple of years ago, there were something like five EVs in the whole city), but I've only seen one personally once (I believe it was a BMW i3).
The bigger issue here is IMO still price - and all EVs are AFAIK imported, which makes them even more expensive.
> The price seems to be the main barrier to EV adoption IMO, and is probably the reason they are so rare where I live (it's a major metropolitan area, and yet so far I have seen a non-rail EV only once).
Interesting. I live near a (relatively!) affluent suburb of Cincinnati and I see at least one or two Teslas a week, depending on how much I'm driving. Our next door neighbors have an electric BMW (i3). And I'm not a car guy, so there could be a lot more than that I'm missing.
Next car I buy will probably be a Tesla? Though it might be a few years.
Of course, this doesn't disprove your point that price is an issue in adoption.
The weight issue is a mixed bag. It can improve handling in some conditions such as bad weather. Regenerative braking makes up for the energy cost fairly well.
The cost is higher up front but lower overall. The comparison is also only fair if you compare similar cost/luxury classes of car. It's not fair to compare a Tesla Model S to a Honda Civic. Instead you'd compare a Model S cost to a mid-high end BMW, Mercedes, Audi, etc. You'd compare a Honda Civic to a Nissan Leaf or a Chevy Bolt.
I'm still waiting for ones not based on "loaded" trims. Appearently the margins are too low to support budget vehicles. Look at trucks. I just want/need a basic work truck. They're about $25k. The lowest cost I've seen for an electric one is about double the cost.
So I agree that you have to compare similar levels/trims, but many times the lower trims don't exist in the EV market.
Battery prices have dropped 89% since 2010. BloombergNEF has predicted that, with battery costs continuing to decline, EVs will be less expensive than ICE cars by 2027. UBS predicts 2024.
I would like to see a source for the first claim. If I recall correctly from my parent's expertise (energy domain) an efficient large power plant (~60-65%) can be ~ 1.5 times more efficient than a modern ICE engine (averaged, Diesel being better than gasoline, around 40%). 3x would push the efficiency over 100%.
Not OP but he’s correct if talking about how much energy actually moves the car —- IC engines are indeed ~40% efficient but if you’re measuring the energy that actually moves the car it’s more like 23%-25% due to all the parasitic and drivetrain losses. So it’s completely plausible for a power plant to be 3x that.
Of course some of those losses would also apply to EVs but still, “wasting” 3/4 the energy of a highly refined, carbon intensive product is a pretty low bar.
Can't find it now, but you are probably right for newer and well maintained ICE engines. I'm guessing that the 1.5X-3X range I saw includes old and badly maintained engines. They could also have been measuring overall fuel to wheel efficiency and including a ~15% loss in the transmission and drive train and maybe also including average time spent idling (which doesn't apply to EVs).
Keep in mind that there are a lot of shitty cars on the road. A power plant's engine is going to usually be well tuned and maintained because small increases in efficiency can be worth a ton of money when you are generating tens of gigawatt hours per day of power. How often does a typical driver of a middle-aged car take it in to be tuned with the objective of maximizing energy efficiency?
I bet the average gap across all cars on the road and including transmission loss is at least 2X.
Also it's tough to argue against the second point. Look into how much power is used in the oil to gasoline supply chain, especially if the oil is coming from heavy oil that requires an additional cracking ("upgrading") step or fracked wells that require a lot of energy to drill and hydraulically fracture. I recall reading an analysis years ago arguing that the Canadian tar sands are almost an indirect natural gas to oil conversion operation rather than a net producer of energy. A huge amount of gas is burned to get that stuff out of the ground and into a form that refineries can handle. You could instead just burn that gas in a combined cycle power plant and run EVs with it and emit a lot less carbon.
Thing is when you are buying any oil product you are really not buying energy. It's ridiculously expensive compared to energy from any other source. You are buying conveniently stored energy and paying a huge markup for it.
I think the only really sustainable car is the one that doesn't exist. Regardless whether your car is electric or ICU it's just a method of transportation that is wasteful of energy and resources and doesn't scale.
Just because it's cleaner doesn't make it clean. My point is that we should be asking questions about the impacts so we can minimize the negative ones.
For example, where is the energy coming from to charge those batteries? Even if we say wind or solar, those devices end up in landfills. Maybe we should look at making these devices recyclable as an integral part of the strategy.
It's okay to point out problems with a path to the future. It's also okay to still take that path even though it's not perfect. Eyes wide open. Lesser of two evils.
The problem is that in open conversation like this a simple statement like 'Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not clean' is insufficiently contextualized to know where the commenter is coming from. Are they just trying to be transparent and realistic? Are they someone that has no dynamic range in their understanding of ecological harm? Are they long in petroleum and want to throw interference up at any point where electrification of transport comes up? Are they just being a contrarian troll?
I'm saying "lithium recycling" isn't yet such a benefit that we don't need to keep mining additional lithium.
Not to suggest OP was doing this, but it seems a bit weird to start your mouth watering at the notion of "I can't wait to strip 11 million tons of rock out of the side of this mountain, melt it down and refine it, so that we can start being clean with it by recycling."
A big factor there is that demand for Lithium is growing drastically and we don't really have that amount of Lithium pre-mined and ready to be recycled in the first place.
Can you go into detail as to how specifically it is not clean, and how it compares to the resource extraction of other things like steel, aluminum, oil, etc.
If people want truly green infrastructure, the only practical options are nuclear power and densification -basically turn as many cities as possible into Paris. LRTs don't need batteries because they're hooked into the grid with catenary lines, subways have 3rd rails, bikes run on human, and e-bikes use only tiny batteries.
And while nuclear power isn't ideal, it's the only tech that has fully decarbonized power grids at State level.
Otherwise we need battery power on an utterly insane level.
This was the common mantra ca. 15 yes ago on Slashdot that made you look extremely in-the-know, with that ineffable quality of genius that cynicism is often mistaken for.
My point is that nowhere has successfully done it. No jurisdiction that I know of has completed a changeover to zero-carbon emissions power based on their wind/solar production, while there are several that have been quietly humming along on 100% nuclear for years.
While there have been massive advancements in wind/solar, the only tech that has been successfully used to create the backbone of a zero-carbon power-grid is nuclear.
Interestingly if we have significant excess production from intermittent sources we can reduce our battery needs. Last I read the best cost/benefit ratio was something like 7x the energy production.
That said nuclear base load makes a _lot_ more sense.
I point to nuclear power simply because it's already proven to work. Overbuilt wind/solar should work in theory, but primarily nuclear-powered grids exist right now.
Where did you read that? Methane which already powers 40% of the US electrical grid can be created and then turned back in electricity in a Electricity→Gas→Electricity process with a round trip efficiency of 30–38% [0]. There is no way you'd need 7x production when you can use surpluses to make methane or hydrogen.
There's a whole spectrum of energy storage tech where the tradeoff is efficiency vs cost. At the extreme end of high cost with high efficiency you have magnetic energy storage, then slightly less-efficient but lower cost you have batteries, then in the middle you have things like synthetic methane, cracking hydrogen, and pumping water up-hill, and at the bottom for lowest-cost and lowest-efficiency you have compressed air.
Finding the right balance of overbuilding supply and storage efficiency is going to be a long process.
The goal was to have a long term hydrogen, mid/peaker battery setup with the minimum cost while providing for the entire grid.
Unfortunately I didn't take notes as to what the source was and I read this about a year ago. Google has been entirely useless as I've tried to dig it back up.
We can't turn US cities into Paris. Turning into Paris requires infrastructure, like subways and the like! But between tariffs on things like steel, gross administrative incompetence, labor union shenanigans, and environmental review laws, the US is incapable of building such infrastructure.
Someone's going to complain "but environmental review is important to protect the environment!" which is why NYC's congestion charge is going to be delayed and litigated for the next 10-20 years in environmental review while cars stuck in traffic spew pollution into the environment.
And someone's going to complain about me mentioning labor unions, too, and admittedly they're sometimes a small part of the problem (when not suing under the environmental review laws) but the Second Avenue Subway still had to give the unions a six-figure payout for using a tunnel boring machine, and every crane has to have someone employed as a full-time oiler because it's still 1910 and we're on steam power. European labor somehow manages to avoid these levels of absurdity.
Not that this is necessarily the top problem. The notoriously free-market pro-business right-wing New York Times (cough, cough) brought over the guy who was in charge of Crossrail, and he was shocked at how many people were standing around the dig site doing nothing. The MTA had no idea why most of them were there getting paid. The MTA also has a bad habit of completing Phase 1 of a project, letting all the contractors who know anything about it go on to other projects, then starting again from scratch on Phase 2 a while later, so that there's absolutely no in-house expertise.
> Also don't forget, many people don't want to live in a crowded, noisy, dirty, disease ridden city.
I dispute that cities are necessarily dirty and disease ridden, particularly the latter. There are models for cities that would work in this regard (e.g. Tokyo, Singapore).
That said, I don't necessarily have much sympathy for the notion that we shouldn't rely on electric cars -- we should just do the simpler option of completely restructuring American cities and reallocating vast numbers of people. Which would be overwhelmingly, unfathomably expensive, as well as rely on people actually wanting to move to the new cities. (Or forcing them to, I suppose.)
Speaking for myself, I like having a bit of space. My very long term goal is to have a house or cabin in some decent forest, secluded and private and peaceful. City life just isn't appealing.
edit: and I'm not saying that cities are our only option, I'm saying that cities are our only option if we want to avoid having to create and maintain an utterly staggering amount of batteries.
> We can't turn US cities into Paris. Turning into Paris requires infrastructure, like subways and the like!
Houston famously has the largest highway in the US - the Katy Freeway (I-10) is 20 lanes + 6 frontage lanes at its widest, and it is an absolute eyesore [0]. Despite the almost $3 billion spent to expand it to 26 lanes, traffic has only gotten worse because of induced demand and the fact that cars are a horrendously inefficient way of moving people since the vast majority of traffic will always be single-occupant. Once you need two lanes in either direction to "fix traffic," you will never be able to keep up with demand unless the area depopulates.
Houstonians who rely on public transit find that their mobility is severely impaired. This is because our suburban sprawl is fundamentally incompatible with the "transit must be partially/wholly sustained by fares" logic which has been employed since the systems began to fall into public ownership as private operators began folding during the post-WW2 white-flight to the suburbs.
Even if you have self-driving electric busses (no driver to pay), you cannot provide sprawling neighborhoods with large minimum lot sizes and detached single-family homes enforced by zoning restrictions "good" bus service simply because of the capital required to purchase enough vehicles to run into these low-density areas regularly. And it should be noted that sub-10 minutes is the headway you need to provide for people to routinely take transit over their car because that feels frequent enough that people don't plan around the bus [1]. More than 20 minutes, and you have lost most potential riders. But in many cities, even 15 minute headways are the exception, not the norm. My home county has a total of 5 bus lines that run once an hour and stop at 8 PM, so the only people who ride it are those without cars. The city I currently live in also has lines that run once an hour (despite having a population of ~850k vs 160k).
So at this point, you might be thinking that America is forever doomed to repeat the abject failure of 20th-century urban planning. But that's not the case: Houston wasn't built around the car, it was destroyed and remade for the car. Like other American cities, if you look at photos of downtown from the early 1900s [2][3], the roads were much smaller, and things were at a human-scale. Photos from the 80s [4], by comparison, are filled with massive roads and parking lots to an almost comical extent. Of course, downtown Houston is nowhere near that bad today [5], but there is still a ton of land producing next to no tax revenue for the city because they are only used to store cars.
My point is that our cities weren't always like this. We can fix them. Yes, it costs money, and yes, it is temporarily inconvenient, but we spent hundreds of billions, if not trillions, rebuilding our cities around the car, so we could easily fund comprehensive public transportation, road-diets, bike lanes, and highway capping (or even outright removal) projects by raising taxes on the rich and eliminating wasteful spending like that which regularly occurs in our defense industry. It means a fundamental change to the American landscape again, of course - the reason we even have large, sprawling neighborhoods that cannot be retrofitted for good public transit is a byproduct of previous federal policies (like red-lining) and zoning restrictions - but as we head towards a climate catastrophe, we have to do something, and it's cheaper to pay up now. Electric self-driving cars will not get us out of this mess; private industry cannot begin to save the environment on its own, nor is it in its best interest to do so.
> The city of Milan built a new subway line, and some of the cheaper subway stations cost €8 million. The city of New York added a single wheelchair ramp to Avenue H which cost $14 million.
This is in large part because the MTA is a state agency. The city has little real control over the MTA. Because the NY legislature is in Albany, they are entirely detached from the realities of city residents who have been hoping for change for decades. Andy Byford is a great example of this: he spearheaded the single greatest increase in subway speeds in a generation, and the SPEED team he created has continued to increase speeds across the system [6]. He is also the reason CBTC is being deployed much more widely across the system [7] (relative to its deployment when he was appointed), and anyone who has taken the 7 or L at rush hour has seen the effects of that: trains run so close together that they oftentimes have to stop and wait for the train in front of them to exit the station.
And Cuomo ran him out of town because he realized Byford was the one getting good PR, rather than the media worshipping him. It's not often that you find people who genuinely care and are able to manage a juggernaut of an agency and make meaningful improvements while warding off meddling attempts from a hostile boss, and I doubt another one will come along for awhile.
There are a lot of reasons the MTA has such high costs. It's basically death by a thousand cuts - many individual laws that, on their own, increase very little, but as a whole have ballooned things to an absurd degree. And because the state legislature doesn't take the MTA to go to work in Albany, they have no reason to try and improve it. There's also a large rural vs urban divide in the legislature, which ultimately makes fixing the cost overrun problems about as easy as making bidding on DoD contracts more competitive.
Really, the best thing that could happen is for the MTA to become a multi-state agency because it already serves NY and CT (via MNR), and NJ gets the shortest straw despite having tons of commuters who would love to not have to drive. Regional planning is next to impossible with the current situation. Combine PATH and the MTA (at minimum), ideally NJTransit as well. Imagine being able to board a train at Trenton and through-run all the way to New Haven or Montauk. This would revolutionize passenger rail in the region, and because all three states would have to agree to such a venture, it would allow side-stepping many of the cuts that plague the MTA today without having to explicitly repeal the legislation. (Not that it would eliminate graft, of course - PATH has plenty - but it would reduce a lot of it.)
But more realistically, the most likely thing would be for the MTA to return to city control. It would likely be much better since local politicians actually use the system and can be held directly to account without the rural vs urban state divide that encourages not improving the status quo, but would still suck for everyone across the Hudson.
Suppose 150k mile car that averages 30mpg. That is 5,000 gallons of fuel weighing 30,000 pounds. The amount of crude to make that oil varies, so actual oil you have to extract and ship and refine will be a bit more than that, and the refinement process is also dirty.
So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium in a Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs < 30,000lbs
Then figure in that those 30,000lbs of oil all go into the air producing not only c02 which is changing our climate, but particulates which are bad for our health and cognitive function, vs the lithium in a battery pack which can be recycled and/or re-used
This seemm like a large net win to me.
All of that said, yes, all of the resource extraction industry, from the iron and aluminum to the oil and lithium, has a bad history of responsible stewardship of the lands they exploit, and I support forcing them to do a better job.
> So compare that 30,000 lbs of oil to the amount of lithium in a Tesla battery pack, which is about 138lbs. 138lbs < 30,000lbs
I think you need to account for the amount of material that was mined to get to that 138lb battery. My understanding is that it's orders of magnitudes more than what gets removed/disrupted for oil. I don't know the figure (and I welcome someone telling me) but I think it could well be in excess of 30,000lbs of raw material mined.
There's also battery recycling to consider.
I don't know which way the result swings; I'm just saying that it's much more complicated to figure out, and far less clear cut, than you suggest.
Yes a complete accounting of the net externalities of each would be very complicated, and I apologize that I am not prepared to present a 200 page research report here in the forum. A bit of napkin math can go a long way.
How much dirt you have to dig up to get a thing isn't really much of a measure of impact though. If I dig up 50,000lbs of dirt to get 138lbs of lithium, but the dirt just goes back to being dirt, no problem. If on the other hand sulfuric acid leeching makes it an uninhabitable wasteland for years, problem.
But yes in the end, recycling batteries is going to be the real big win, where all the components can be reused rather than mined.
That is true. However much of that stuff can basically be piled and is not really damaging to the environment. Lithium is usually only about <5% of any given rock.
That is far better then blowing tons of things into the air. Its just a stack of crushed rocks.
I wish that the damage of lithium mining would be specified and put into specific terms about what the damage is and what's it's doing.
For example, fracking in California results in 26 acres of toxic storage pools that are leaking and contaminating ground water with specific toxic chemicals:
However, every single story about the toxicity of battery production remains vague and I haven't been able to find any that specify what the damage is. I have found that indigenous people are having their land used without much permission or process, but the damage has never been specified.
Does anybody have some specifics about what's going on? Presumably there must be an environmental cost but it's really unclear what it is, or how it compares to the regular destruction that we embrace from fossil fuels.
Let’s hope it stays that way. But $1.5B is not a tiny sum and I’m willing to bet the government will bend over backwards to bring a bunch of “jobs” to the area at the expense of all environmental concerns.
Greedy lobbyists in the state capital would object to this. Ecotourism is seen by voters as one of Maine’s largest industries. Much of its real estate industry and its most well-known brand (LL Bean) relies on it.
You have a delusional believe in the power of lobbying. Establishing a mine in the US is incredibly hard. Even in places with existing mining, establishing a new mine is a major undertaking.
Mines even in mining friendly places is very, very hard. Doing it mining unfriendly places where you have real popular opposition is bordering on impossible.
Yes, neither option may be perfect. But just claiming that, therefore, they are equally bad is philistine. It's a full embrace of a talking point even ExxonMobile has retired.
It's a very misleading statement to bluntly compare a consumable Ressource with a recycle metal.
While it is known that lithium itself has environmental issues the potential reuse and benefit of pulling it out of the earth to make batteries will have a very long and positive outcome for us.
And to a certain degree the initial disruption might be totally worth it in the long run in comparison to stuff we just burn away.
“Yet lithium is a metal, and state regulations passed in 2017 prohibit mining for metals in open pits of more than three acres, which would be the only way to cost-effectively extract lithium at Plumbago North.
“I don’t know of any underground and manganese or lithium mines in the world,” said Dr. John Slack, a geologist who co-authored a separate upcoming paper on critical minerals in Maine.
“Because those metals have a relatively low cost, in terms of their concentration per ton or per ounce, you need to excavate large volumes of rock cheaply in order to economically and profitably produce the metal you’re interested in.””
Basically, Maine demands that whatever mining is done, is done underground, like coal. But open carrier mining is cheaper. If all this lithium is so important, someone will find a way to mine it properly underground, I guess.
"But [the lithium] reserves also would not present the same type of potential environmental issues as ... other base metal sulfide deposits in Maine, such as Bald Mountain. That’s because the Plumbago North deposit does not occur in, or contain, sulfide-rich rocks, said Slack and Simmons. Mining for lithium there would instead be similar to quarrying for granite or gravel."
Are rock queries outlawed? I don't believe so. Thus, is this a lithium rock query or a lithium mineral mine?
3 acres, I'm assuming, is the issue. That's not really that big. It's actually really quite small.
The only open pit mine I'm familiar with is measured in the literal thousands of acres. Hell, the local gravel pit that supplies the VERY rural area I live in is over 70 acres.
I think this is part of that distinction. Likely a gravel pit would _not_ be considered "mineral mining" and so would be permitted at a size greater than 3 acres.
So how common is lithium on earth anyway? Is it like the new oil? Can we make it in the lab? Will we wage war over it? Will we deplete it? Can we find it on the moon or Mars?
It is the 33rd most abundant element on earth. However, as it is highly reactive it is never found in its pure form in nature, and right now, we extract it from mineral rich brine from lakes. This process uses a lot of water, approximately 500,000 gallons of water goes into extracting 1 ton of lithium, enough to make 190,000 smartphones.
I think we’ll wage war over water before we wage one over Lithium.
In the process described above its evaporated. Other processes that are in development pump it back into the underground brine (just a little less salty).
What is relevant here is that this is salty brine water, not drinking water.
And the water usage is very different for what we are talking about here. This is not a brine mine, but a spodumene rock mine. That uses far less water.
Lithium is only created in stellar events (Big Bang, super novas). There’s no natural way for it form on Earth.
As a result all lithium deposits we’re created during the formation of the planet as it coalesced out of interstellar dust. Consequently the distribution of Lithium around the planet is pretty even. There’s no “hot spots” of high concentration, and every country has a supply proportional to its land mass.
That, plus the relative abundance of Lithium, means it’s unlikely that fighting a war for Lithium will ever make sense. Much easier and cheaper to just dig in your own backyard, than fight for someone’s backyard that has the same dirt in it.
'Naturally forming' elements on Earth are limited to uranium fission products.
Lithium (also aluminium, magnesium, sodium) distribution is due to it being light and chemically active, thus ending up in crust, while heavier metals (iron, nickel) end up in mantle and core. It takes specific geological circumstances to bring mantle material into crust, so there are 'hot spots'. Lithium is already there, so it is spread somewhat evenly.
One difference is that it can be recovered from worn out lithium batteries. So at some point we could theoretically
have enough lithium from recycled batteries that we no longer need to mine a significant amount of it.
It's fairly common. Known reserves amount to around 80 million tons. Yearly production is around 100k tons.
I think I saw a projection for a yearly consumption of around 1.7m tons in 2030.
I'd say the biggest issue is simply going to be environmental impact. This is a big reserve that can't be mined because of environmental regulation. That's a lot of money to just pass on, and I don't think that's going to hold.
Is it really that much money? It’s not like that’s pure profit; mining requires large up-front capital investment to even start. Break that down to 20 years (round number for illustration purposes only, seemingly on the quick side based on quick searching), and you’re down to $75mm/year which begins to sound like a lot less money when you start adding the recurring costs of operation to the initial capital cost. Add in the state mandates for damage escrow and you’re probably looking at a business that makes the owners wealthy, but otherwise produces only a handful of jobs and minimal tax revenue while permanently destroying some of the natural beauty of a state heavy on tourism that relies on that beauty.
Put another way: if it was a lot of money they’d find a way to do it underground.
There really isn’t that much lithium in today’s “Lithium ion” batteries. A few percent by weight. Much more Nickel, Cobalt, Aluminum, Carbon, Copper, and Iron than Lithium. Lithium metal anodes would push that number up but that flavor hasn’t really solved it’s lifespan problems yet.
Stating there isn't much lithium in a single cell isn't really meaningful; there are a lot of individual batteries, and the number keeps growing, so we still require a lot of lithium to be mined. Relatively less than other minerals, but still a significant amount and still destructive to the local area where lithium is mined.
my understanding is that it is super common, but not very concentrated in the earth. As a result it makes mining more difficult. You don't just find a ore vein in a cave, you have to dig up and process tons of stone in a wider area.
War over lithium would be totally insane. Every continent has basically unlimited amount of lithium.
Its not an energy source and the ratio of how expensive it is to mine and how expensive you can sell it is nowhere close to oil.
Fighting wars over lithium deposit would be insanely dumb and that will never happen.
Lithium is not a consumable, once you have it you keep it. We need it now to grow the fleet but once the fleet is replaced recycling will be the most economical way to get it.
As a factorio player, energy storages are as important as energy source itself. Especially for renewables since the energy sources are practically unlimited (and the efficiencies are increasing) but very fluctuate.
And if you see from other perspective, oil are both energy storage and energy source, which is "almost" equivalent with solar cells and batteries.
As I said in my other reply, I think the difference is really ERoEI. And that's very likely an important difference. Because you wouldn't get an economical system if you're not able to get a competitive ERoEI from the whole system (including storage). I suspect to take oil's status you'd therefore have to have something that allows you to also cheaply get the energy, not only store it.
Lithium as an input to storage is really just a small part of the whole picture. Like a barrel is for oil.
It's an intermediary source and it doesn't care where that energy came from. The oil analogy is not that far fetched if you consider that both are tied to a geographic location where they needs to be extracted.
That's likely true if you look at network effects, but maybe not so true if you look at energy return on energy invested (ERoEI). In my opinion, the latter is a big part of oil's status as a "universal" energy source/carrier.
Something about the economics of lithium, and other recently important minerals confuses me.
How is a $1.5bn deposit, a major, significant source? That's would be about 10 days worth of oil. The whole global lithium market is just $3bn-$4bn pa. The rare earth market is about $2.5bn annually. Seems super low, relative to headlines/concerns/etc.
How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?
> How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?
My guess is the amount of skill required to get these materials. Miners can be paid pennies and they'll still do the work. Something similar to how garbage takeaway is of very high importance, but economically pretty minor.
I'm not seeing the analogy. The lithium market is surprisingly small for the same reasons that plastics are...?
I concede the point that small individual parts of the overall waste economy are prominent problems... but where's the way back to lithium.
Lithium is cheap enough that Elon could buy all of it with just his bitcoin. He's a guy with a use for lithium. Why not solve all possible scarcity concerns with the jingle of a purse. More realistishly... Unless there's something I'm missing, I can't see how a lithium price spike could affect the price of an electric car noticeably.
My analogy wasn't about any special processing or any special segment of garbage. It was a more basic comparison that we as a western society depend heavily on regular garbage takeaway (because we consume so much single use crap) but the people who take away our garbage aren't paid much and get looked down upon on top of that. So it's an important part of society that is severely underpriced compared to the value it provides. One of the primary reasons it can be so underpriced is because the workforce can be trivially trained (relatively speaking) and there seems to always be enough people interested in working.
From your comment that the lithium market is so small, yet always talked about as criticial - I guessed that perhaps that's because it's similarly easy to find and train lithium miners.
As for Elon and lithium, I remember recently watching some interview or talk that he gave, where he mentioned that he doesn't consider lithium a problem at all precicely because it is so abundant in the US.
So yes, to me it seems as well that there is no scarcity to fear. There might be a temporary shortage, but it can be solved rather quickly with money.
These elements are critical but tiny parts of a number of products. Downstream users and even governments make a lot of noise about ensuring affordable supplies, but major multinational miners are slow and cautious about developing new projects. The total addressable market isn't that large. Miners aren't interested in over-supplying these commodities as a favor to manufacturers of batteries, magnets, or light bulbs. Especially for rare earth elements, market demand is so limited that one new major producer could significantly reduce market prices.
Why doesn't someone just "solve this problem with money." I realize this is a simplification, but any number of actors could affordably silo a massive stockpile and make the risk of supply deficits go away entirely.
Some of the politicians bringing this stuff up as major future risks could personally afford to seriously mitigated on their personal accounts.
The United States used to stockpile raw materials for military use. A lot of that ended after the Cold War did because it was considered inefficient. (And it probably was; efficiency and resiliency are at odds here.)
As a resident I'm curious to how this will play out. I have no strong opinions either way but I feel like it's going to be a long legal battle.
The current ongoing thing here is that the power company wants to build a power corridor to transport electricity from Canada to Mass. The power company has gone through questionable means to do this and the locals are rightfully unhappy about it. It's hard to not hear about it right now.
> “The call to restrict open pit mining — that’s the open sore in the face of the Earth argument,” said Dr. Martin Yates, laboratory manager and instructor at the School of Earth and Climate Sciences at the University of Maine. “Once you’ve opened a hole like that, it’s not really going to grow back.”
Maine is full of holes in the ground where granite was extracted. I can totally understand why some of the population wants to strictly regulate mining.
I went camping in Maine a few years ago, and the campground had visible artifacts from mining. The people running the campground told us that "everyone" goes swimming in deep flooded granite pits.
The campground itself had a flooded granite pit near the bathroom. It had a paddle boat that I used, but swimming was prohibited because of "insurance" and supposed abandoned mining equipment in the bottom of the pit. There was also an abandoned pump visible at the top of the pit.
When we walked around, there was surface granite clearly stripped away as well.
> I can totally understand why some of the population wants to strictly regulate mining.
Regulating resource extraction out of existence is popular in southeast Maine where the economy runs off of tourism and retirement savings from people in Massachusetts for a variety of reasons that biol down to ideology and no skin in the game.
>>The company extracted roughly 800,000 tons of copper and zinc before flooding the area, turning it into Goose Pond.
>>The former mine is now a Superfund site, and a 2013 study by researchers at Dartmouth College found widespread evidence of toxic metals in nearby sediment, water and fish. Cleanup costs, borne by taxpayers, are estimated between $23 million and $45 million.
Yup, that company successfully extracted the value and externalized the costs onto the taxpayers - they got the benefit and we hold the bag of crap.
Which is precisely why the laws were passed in the first place, because this was not an exception, but standard procedure.
If they want to relent and allow standard mining, then they need to require an up-front bond of the appropriate amount to fund the cleanup, on the scale of $100 million.
Anything short of that is utterly foolish (it's not like we're ignorant of standard mining practices).
<sarc>I'm sure the financial genius MBAs can figure it out (along with how to still screw the general public plebes). </sarc>
> By 2030, the International Energy Agency estimates that supply from existing mines and projects under construction will produce only half the amount of lithium and cobalt necessary to meet international needs.
The mining has to be does somewhere at some point... barring a breakthrough in alternative battery chemistry in the next half decade. Not saying it needs to be in this mine, but the countries that do currently supply the world with lithium are securing a greater economic foothold. Of course I'd wish for every nation to be all honky-dory with each other but there are regimes whose optimization function is absolute domestic power and international domination.
Please refrain from pointing out the tired old truth that the US was or is such a country.
Lithium batteries seem to blow up a lot or a lot more than they should. People say that this doesn't matter for the best made batteries, which is fair in those cases, but judging safety relative to an ideal is not wise.
Its also absolutely terrible for the local environment to mine it. That should be well known by now (e.g. effects in Bolivia / Chile).
I'm more interested to see where Catl and Faradion or others go with sodium ion technology. Zinc and potassium are also good candidates too. For now, the lithium show continues though unfortunately.
Compared to ICE cars, EV car fires are not that common. There are a couple of hundred people that die in ICE vehicle related fires and around 170000 cars that catch fire every year in the US. Check here for a breakdown of ways that can happen:
https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safet...
Here's a beautiful quote for you: "There are more than 19 vehicle fires every hour in the United States. They account for 1 in every 8 calls that fire departments respond to."
That puts the handful of burning EVs that catch the news once in a while a bit in perspective. It does happen but not that often. Even if you consider there are about 20x more ICE vehicles sold in the US, it's still quite a lot in comparison.
Anyway, lithium battery fires are comparatively slow so mostly people just get out of the vehicle. Basically, you stop the car, get out and call the firemen. Petrol tanks going boom is less common than Hollywood movies make it seem but still, they occasionally do blow up with people still inside the car. Not a good place to be when a few gallons of fuel is combusting. Hence a couple hundred casualties every year.
Point taken on EVs! My only experience is using them for robot builds and it may be the quality of the battery thats at issue.
In comparison to fossil fuels lithium is obviously way better but I think long term I would prefer to use sodium based batteries due to their abundance, ease of manufacture, and potential lower extraction-related pollution. Explosion related concerns are not the best counter argument.
Think about how much easier it would be to extract sodium. If half the effort went into making those batteries better the lithium scramble could have a chance of ending. Zinc bromine is another good option which would be relatively ok in terms of availability.
Why is everyone so keen on lithium when, to me, it's almost a footnote in battery components by weight? Cobalt and nickel are the heaviest. Cobalt is the priciest constituent...
Figuring out how to mine this safely seems like a decent project for the Department of Energy's ARPA-E project. It's worth an evaluation at any rate. https://arpa-e.energy.gov/
Surely there are some National Lab boffins with expertise in environmental protection.
It’s only worth 1.5B if you can extract it as an open pit mine, which is terrifically terrible for the environment. Waving that number around is nonsense because it ignores the societal and environmental costs of open pit mining.
This is sort of disheartening... Maine would allow the mining if it were properly handled, but because it's cheaper to do in third world countries, companies will do it there. Electric has a very dirty side :/
A couple comments already mentioned it but $1.5B is not a huge number for the mining industry. Many mines in the US/Can bring in that amount in revenue on a yearly basis.
That depends. How much of the earth's surface needs to be mined to obtain enough lithium and other minerals to supply the world with batteries? And what will we use to charge he batteries?
What matters in lithium industry, is chemical processing. Nobody cares about a lithium mining company. What matters is lithium processing.
Lithium is not like a base metal, its more like a specialty chemical. The output from every mine is unique, there is not overall standard. Each output from each mine has to be qualified with each major battery manufacturer.
Nevada has 100s of billion of dollars worth of lithium by itself probably.
This will almost certainty not be mined. Making money from this kind of rock is difficult in the first place and doing it in a place with little mining industry makes that even worse.
Edit:
If you want insight into lithium industry, I recommend 'Global Lithium Podcast' by a guy that has been in that business for many decades and has worked for all the many of the major producers.